Hegel's republican idea of freedom: A comparision between Hegel's idea of freedom and Pettit's freedom as non-domination

In the history of modern political philosophy, Hegel's political thought has been interpreted in many different and incompatible ways. While some have ascribed him the label of totalitarian, others have considered him as a liberal. In this thesis, my aim is to show that Hegel's political philosophy and chiefly, his concept of freedom, has its roots in republican political thought. I compare Hegel's concept of freedom with modern republicanism, especially Philip Pettit's conception of freedom as non-domination. Despite the fact that Pettit and Hegel have different starting points and their theories of freedom are based on different metaphysics, I argue that their understandings of freedom and their emphasis on recognition, do not differ. More precisely, I will argue that the structure of the modern republican idea of freedom as non-domination can be understood as Hegel's 'being-with-oneself-in-an-other'. However, at the same time, we will see that in the application of his modern republican idea of freedom to the institutions of Sittlichkeit, Hegel reverts to the classical republicanism and therefore contradicts himself. In order to show all this, I start by taking freedom to be at the center of Hegel's social and political thought. In the second chapter, I position my interpretation among the three main broad readings of Hegel. After briefly discussing totalitarian, metaphysical and non-metaphysical, that is Kantian or 'self-actualization' readings of Hegel, I argue for the latter and offer particular support for Alan Patten's 'civic humanist' interpretation. The third chapter will be entirely concerned with the third possibility of defining freedom that is freedom as non-domination. After elaborating the main points of Pettit's modern republicanism, I compare it with Hegel's understanding of freedom in the fourth chapter. We will see that for Hegel, as well as for Pettit, relations to others, what we can call recognitive relations, are constitutive of freedom. In the last chapter, I will show how Hegel's republican idea of freedom is realized in the ethical institutions of the modern state. While Hegel designs ethical institutions that are determined to be necessary by the structure of freedom itself, we will see that, in contrast to his modern republican idea of freedom, these institutions – family, civil society and the state – expose many to dependency and domination.